We brought our biscuit-making to a fine art. One of the ground-floor rooms had been set apart as the officers' shop for carpentry and bootmaking--for we had long taken to making our own furniture and repairing our own boots. Here then was started the "Bimbashi"[7] Biscuit Department of Escapers, Limited. At one bench would be Grunt and Johnny busily engaged in the uncongenial task of taking the stalks off sultanas, and the pleasanter one of eating a few. At another stood Perce with his bared forearms buried deep in a mixture of flour, sugar, and sultanas, to which from time to time Nobby would add the requisite quantities of water and eggs. The Old Man presided at the scales and, weighing out the dough into lumps sufficient for twenty biscuits, passed them on to Looney. Armed with rolling-pin, carving-knife, and straight-edge, the latter would flatten out each lump until it filled up the inside of a square frame which projected slightly above the bench to which it was fixed. When a level slab had been obtained, the ruler would be placed against marks on the frame and the slab cut five times in one direction and four in the other. It then only remained to transfer the twenty little slabs to boards, prick them with any fancy pattern with a nail, and send them to be baked by one of our orderlies. The biscuits were each about the size of a quarter-plate and half an inch thick, and when cooked weighed five to the pound, and were as hard as rocks. Their best testimonial was that, without being kept in tins, they remained perfectly good for six months. The biscuit-making concern was run regardless of expense. A pound of flour was costing at that time two shillings, sugar ten shillings, sultanas five; and eggs three pence apiece. (These, by the way, were only about half of what we soon after found ourselves paying at Yozgad.) The final cost was something like half-a-crown a biscuit.